by Sam Wilkin | Feb 5, 2019 | Blog
Why does the advent of a major new media technology so often coincide with political upheaval or even revolution? To name a few examples: the broadcast radio and the rise of Adolf Hitler; the cassette tape and the Iranian Revolution; the fax machine and the fall of...
by Sam Wilkin | Jul 30, 2018 | Blog
This is a bad moment for technocracy and those of us who love it. US progressives tend to favor one of two stories to explain 2016’s populist backlash against mainstream politics. The first is a surprising rise in the number of racists; the second is a dramatic...
by Sam Wilkin | Mar 5, 2018 | Blog
Anyone just about recovered from the Brexit shock should spare a thought for Italy. About a decade ago, many middle-class Italians considered Silvio Berlusconi, a populist billionaire convicted of bribery and tax fraud, and known globally for his “Bunga Bunga”...
by Sam Wilkin | Aug 24, 2016 | Blog
The past decade has upended my profession almost entirely. I work in political risk, and my job is to advise companies how to manage political and economic instability. A coup in Turkey, sanctions against Russia, unrest in Venezuela, debt default in Argentina – such...
by Sam Wilkin | Jul 11, 2016 | Blog
The world economy has in the past few years undergone a dramatic shift. Chinese industrial growth – for decades 10 percent or higher – has declined nearly to nil. Global commodity prices have shifted from high to low. At the same time, the U.S. dollar has surged from...
by Sam Wilkin | Jun 2, 2016 | Blog
Updated April 2019 I’ve been employed to analyze geopolitics and the world economy for about twenty years now, which means, alarmingly, I’ve got a track record. (Most of my publicly-available articles are now posted on this blog.) What did I get wrong, and what did I...
